VIOLENCE is continuing in the West Bank following Israel’s largest invasion of the region in more than 20 years.
Early on Sunday, three Israeli police officers were killed after Palestinian militants opened fire on a vehicle along a road in the occupied West Bank.
Israel has carried out large-scale raids in the West Bank in recent days, mainly focused on urban refugee camps in the northern part of the territory, where Israeli forces have traded fire with militants on a near-daily basis since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
The police confirmed all three killed were officers and said the assailants fled.
A little-known militant group calling itself the Khalil al-Rahman Brigade claimed responsibility, while Hamas praised the attack as a “natural response” to the war in Gaza and called for more.
The West Bank has seen a surge in violence since Hamas’s October 7 attack out of Gaza ignited the war.
More than 650 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, mainly during Israeli military arrest raids. Most appear to have been militants involved in gun battles with Israeli forces, but civilian bystanders and protesters throwing rocks have also been killed.
The last 10 months have also seen an uptick in settler violence directed at Palestinians and in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. The last serious peace talks collapsed more than 15 years ago.
Israel has built more than 100 settlements across the West Bank, some of which resemble suburbs and small towns. More than 500,000 settlers with Israeli citizenship live in the settlements, which most of the international community considers illegal.
The three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority exercising limited autonomy in population centres.
It comes as Palestinian health authorities and United Nations agencies have begun a large-scale campaign of vaccinations against polio, hoping to prevent an outbreak in Gaza.
Authorities plan to vaccinate children in central Gaza until Wednesday, before moving on to the more devastated northern and southern parts of the strip.
The campaign began with a small number of vaccinations on Saturday and aims to reach about 640,000 children.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday that Israel has agreed to limited pauses in the fighting to facilitate the campaign. There were initial reports of Israeli strikes in central Gaza early on Sunday, but it was not immediately known if anyone was killed or injured.
Hospitals in Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat confirmed the campaign had begun on Sunday.
Gaza recently reported its first polio case in 25 years – a 10-month-old boy, now paralysed in the leg.
WHO said the presence of a paralysis case indicates there could be hundreds more who have been infected but are not showing symptoms.
Most people who have polio do not experience symptoms, and those who do usually recover in a week or so. But there is no cure, and when polio causes paralysis, it is usually permanent. If the paralysis affects breathing muscles, the disease can be fatal.
The vaccination campaign faces a host of challenges, from ongoing fighting to devastated roads and hospitals shut down by the war.
Around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced within the besieged territory, with hundreds of thousands crammed into squalid tent camps.
The vaccinations will be administered at roughly 160 sites across Gaza, including medical centres and schools. Children under 10 will receive two drops of oral polio vaccine in two rounds, the second to be administered four weeks after the first.
Israel allowed around 1.3 million doses to be brought into the territory last month, which are now being held in refrigerated storage in a warehouse in Deir al-Balah. Another shipment of 400,000 doses is set to be delivered to Gaza soon.
